Gartner Hype Cycle methodology is very popular among businesses because it offers details on how technologies will evolve over time. It is also extremely important because it provides insights useful to accelerate business performance.

There still is confusion, even though cloud is one of the favorite buzzwords in the IT sector. Still, not everyone understands all of clouds capabilities and benefits. Cloud computing is often brought into discussions to cut IT costs, although this benefit might not be received. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2012, the best results are achieved by companies that concentrate all their efforts on a very specific strategy and use cloud-based technologies in order to accelerate their performance. However, Gartner says that interest in cloud computing has peaked and is now going into the “Trough of Disillusionment”. Mainstream adoption of cloud is expected to happen from 2014 to 2017.

Experts predict that many of the technologies will transform in the near future. For example, virtualization will endure significant changes in the next two years; also, they predict mainstream adoption for this time period for sales force automation, SaaS and virtualization; in the next 2 to years big data, advertising in the cloud, cloud computing, PaaS, public cloud will change significantly.

Other findings:

Cloud email – by 2014 is expected to have a 10 percent adoption rate in organizations. This is half of hype cycles prediction.

In the next 2-5 years, big data will provide different types of benefits to organizations. By 2015, it is expected to enable companies adopting this technology to defeat competitors by 20 percent in every existing financial metric.

PaaS continues to be one of the the most misunderstood services of cloud computing, because of the great gap between enterprise expectations and experiences.

SaaS is rapidly adopted in enterprises and Gartner predicts that over 50 percent of organization will have some form of SaaS-based application strategy by 2015.

Personal Cloud it is expected to replace the personal computer by 2014.

Private cloud is one of the highest interest areas in the industry. Over 75 percent of respondents said that they are planning to follow a strategy in this area by 2014.